Tag: jrpg

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Shelved It #4 – Persona 5

More Info from Atlas

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PS3

Admittedly this is a shelved it, kinda sorta.  I fully intend to play through the rest of this in some form, even if it involves just turning down the difficulty to get through boss fights.  I’m at a point where my lack of patience for the boss fight structure makes me not care about spending the effort to get through the fights, but the world that was built for this game is so good that I still feel compelled to see it.  However, given I’m bending the rules to move forward, I felt like it was worth writing about this as a normal shelving incident.

I’ve played a lot of the Megami Tensei games, whether it’s the mainline titles, Persona titles, or even tangentially related ones like Tokyo Mirage Sessions. It’s worth noting in particular that Tokyo Mirage is probably the best straight JRPG I played in 2016. The biggest core problem that I typically run into is that while the shared battle system encourages smart planning to chain moves in killing enemies, it simultaneously encourages the enemies to have extremely high damage and the same chaining abilities as a balance point. The end result is a mix of fights where the difference between an extremely easy fight and one where I get one turn wiped is one that doesn’t involve player skill at all.

In general I like the battle system that these games use.  The general setup is that you have a collection of demons with varying stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities, as well as core physical attacks.  By taking advantage of the range of capabilities at your disposal, you can maximize damage and knock down enemies through attacking opposition weaknesses.  In doing so, you gain extra attacks for hitting these weaknesses, giving the ability to chain attacks through the entire enemy party.  Once they are all down, the group can attack the entire opposition at once, generally resulting in a complete wipe of the enemies.  This system works fantastically well for your normal trash fights, and I could generally do most trash fights without ever being attacked, let alone taking damage.  First times against new demons up being an interesting puzzle-solving opportunity in figuring out what weaknesses can be exposed, then further fights are usually a quick mop up.  Getting through dungeons generally then becomes limited more by a lack of resources, or a need to go buy more SP items, rather than a need to run away for safety reasons.

Boss fights in the game generally involve the same fight pattern, with the obvious difference of not being able to one shot the fight.  I’d go in with some assumed set of gear that I kind of hoped would be close to functional, then either win with no trouble or wipe immediately to some form of chain attack.  If I wiped, I’d reshuffle gear, make sure I had different Personas equipped, and generally get through the phase where I died.  This cycle would continue until the boss ran out of new mechanics and I won.  My problem with this is that at no point did I feel the challenge was actually in finishing the boss fights.  It was entirely in getting arbitrary gear to block mechanics, and having no trouble once those were covered.  Rather than wipes being something that were caused by lack of skill, wipes were something I fixed by changing my accessories.  The cycle of discovery in this was not something I was doing for fun, but something I was doing because the battle system actively seeks to punish you for not having specific setups.  Once that setup is achieved, the boss fights lose their challenge, and end up being simple rotation fights that are not any different than big number trash fights.

The unfortunate thing is that the world surrounding this is fantastic.  Persona games have always been good at mixing relatively believable characters with the Japanese lore-based fantasy and this one is no exception.  The cast of characters that I had seen thus far covered a pretty wide range of personalities from your jocks to the more reserved, as well as their typical animal that talks stand-in.  The visual style, particularly within the dungeons, is also about as fantastically stylish as you’ll see in a JRPG.  This is backed by another fantastic soundtrack that pretty seamlessly flows between rock and acid jazz to fit the situation.  On its own I don’t know that we’re going to see another game this year that will be so iconic in its visual and audio design as Persona 5.

Ultimately I’m not that surprised I’m at this point.  Since I’ve played this series before, I knew what my problems were going to be with the battle system going in.  I guess if there’s anything I’m surprised about, it’s that I’ve already hit the point where I stopped caring without being anywhere near the finish.

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Game Ramblings #32 – Tales of Berseria

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: JRPG
  • Also Available On: Steam, PS3 (Japan Only)

The Tales of series has been going on for a long time.  Most people’s familiarity with it is directly tied with the GameCube release of Symphonia, but that’s just one of many main line titles in the series.  Berseria in a lot of ways feels like a final act in the PS3 game line and a natural progression of the PS3 titles starting with Xillia.  With this being a direct universe prequel to Zestiria this makes quite a bit of sense.  However, there’s been a number of changes that have pushed the gameplay ever further towards a direct action RPG style.

The biggest high level difference long time Tales of players will notice is that this story is decidedly darker than your typical titles in the series.  The surface level of the story is very direct with this in that you are playing the bad guys.  At its core, your group is basically out to destroy the world, even if their motives are somewhat more selfish than that.  However, beyond the surface layer, there are a number of themes that play on negative psychological aspects that I was surprised to see in such detail.  All that said, the progression and ultimate redemption of the party in the final act is worth the pay off.  Players of Zestiria will also connect a lot of dots about how the game’s shared universe works, and the return of a handful of characters from the previous title adds a nice layer of depth to the universe, even though the thousand year gap between the two games means they are largely disconnected from each other.

At a gameplay level, things are largely as they have been for a while, with some key differences once the battle system is reached.  Like Zestiria and the Xillia titles, there is no distinction between dungeons and a larger scale overworld.  Everything is interconnected using realistic scale environments, so moving between towns, fields, and dungeons is fairly direct.  The environments are scattered with non-random battles that start with interacting with enemies.  There are also your standard assortment of treasure chests, as well as the return of herbs and item spheres that can be collected around.  The only new addition to item pick ups are Katt souls, which serve as a secondary currency for unlocking some specific chests largely filled with outfits and visual accessories.  The end result is that if you’ve played a Tales of  game on PS3 in the last 5 years, you know what you’re getting into here.

Battles are where the gameplay has changed the most.  Pretty much every Tales of game in the past has had standard attacks on one face button, and Artes attacks using a secondary resource on another face button.  This is all gone.  For one thing, all attacks are now set by the player across the four face buttons based on a position within a combo chain.  All attacks and artes now using a single resources that determines how many attacks can be chained in a single combo.  The resource stack grows by applying negative conditions to enemies or properly timing dodges, and shrinks when negative conditions are applied to the player.  With 3+ resources available, the player can also activate a special overdrive-like mode or special attacks, depending on the character, giving a boost to damage as well as a significant heal.  Because of the constant back and forth in changing the active combo length, as well as the layout of the custom combos, the game feels very distinctly like a 3D fighting game in battle.  While these titles have always been very action-focused, the changes here have pushed the game in a direction that is a distinctly fresh take on the gameplay, even if a lot of the core pieces are very recognizable to returning players.

Also of note to the core gameplay loop are some changes to the gearing system.  Stats are still very much there, but the most important aspect to gear is a mastery stat.  Every piece of gear has a mastery stat, which can be anything from flat stats (+x Defense, etc), to type-specific increases (+x% damage to undead), to very specific effects around status conditions (-x% time to applied poisons).  Once an item mastery has been earned, it is permanently applied to the character.  Because of this change, I was typically wearing whatever gear was not mastered, rather than whatever gear was the best.  By the end of the game, the summation of all these individual masteries was easily more important than changes in stats between two pieces of gear, so I was constantly searching both in shops as I got to them, as well as for treasure chests in all the environment areas for new gear that I hadn’t seen before.

Given that we haven’t heard anything about the next Tales of title, my assumption is that they’re now digging in to get going on the true next-gen progression of the series.  While Zestiria and Berseria were on PS4, they were direct ports from PS3 titles released at the same time.  Given the departure that the PS3 titles were from some of the past games, I can only assume that we’re going to see a similar change in gameplay for whatever the next title will be.  However, it feels like the changes have already started here.  The action focus of the battle system is a very distinctly new feel to the series, even if a lot of the core pieces feel the same.  Because of the constant healing and changes to gear mastery, the game felt more focused than ever on the core combo-based action, rather than the number crunching typical of most JRPGs.  Like Final Fantasy 15, it feels like they’re moving further away from what started the series’ popularity, but like FF 15, I’m also pretty confident it’s for the best.  Technology has progressed to the point where we can have the grand adventures, as well as fast paced gameplay, and I feel like we’re only scratching the surface of where this series will be going in the future.

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Game Ramblings #29 – Final Fantasy VIII

More Info from Wikipedia

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS1
  • Also Available On: Steam, PSN

For the first game of the year, I went with…..an old game?  It’s been a while since I played something that I’d really describe as a straight JRPG.  Pokemon Moon was probably about as close as I’ve been recently, so I pulled this one out of the pile.  Having never finished it, I went into it a bit nervous.  The last time I tried replaying a PS1 FF game (FF9), I shelved it almost immediately due to the slow pace of the battles and slow progression of the story.  While this one certainly suffers some of the slow battle pace, mostly due to the summons system, a lot of the other systems that the game was built around have ended up aging incredibly well compared to many of its peers.

I guess I’ll get this out of the way first; the story of FF8 has held up very well.  The core group has a wide range of different personalities that don’t end up irritating me.  The world the game lives in has a nice variety of different settings, and a generally well put together overarching plot.  There’s a relatively well put together love story between two of the main party.  In general, this is still one of the better stories in the Final Fantasy series, and it’s held up pretty well.  It’s also worth noting that this is probably my favorite soundtrack in total in the series.  There’s obviously the high points in other games, but the FF8 soundtrack has always impressed me throughout in how consistently good it is throughout the game.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the game itself.

Let’s start with the core of the game, the battle system.  While at its core it definitely is a Final Fantasy ATB-style battle system, the removal of mana from this game has a lot of interesting ramifications.  Instead of using mana, spells are drawn from enemies and the environment and stocked per-character.  These drawn spells also then act as a replacement for equipment typical of most FF games, and can be applied to characters for boosts to all stats.  For my playthrough, this vastly increased the value of typical trash fights, as I’d be paying attention to what magic was available in each area in order to stock up on useful spells that I could not depend on being available further into the game.

The other significant change is that levels, while potentially important to a standard play through, function entirely different from the rest of the series.  Leveling up is straight out 1000 EXP per level.  While this may sound kind of strange, apart from a handful of areas that are fixed level, the rest of the enemies (including bosses) scale with the player’s level.  For me, this basically gave me an expected flat difficulty throughout the game, which tended to minimize the amount of grind that I needed to do in any area.  This also means that the game can be cheesed in curious ways.  For example, the game could theoretically be finished with 0 exp, as bosses don’t give experience.  I suspect the group can also effectively start the game at level 100 if enough grinding is completed in the starting area of the game.  The end result of all this is that the game became a lot more about a per-fight strategy, instead of the typical back and forth of hitting a difficulty spike and grind wall that FF games were usually prone to.

All that said, I was kind of surprised by how well this one has aged.  It’s certainly not without its problems.  Boss fight strategy can often be vague, resulting in the need to get entirely wiped at times to figure out the specific set of things needing to be done.  The actual summon animations are also incredibly unnecessarily long, though the dependency on using summons is typically tied to specific fights.  However, this is still a JRPG that I’d recommend to fans of the genre that haven’t played it in the past.  With it now easily available on PSN and Steam, there’s not much excuse for gamers on modern platforms to skip it if they feel the need to scratch that JRPG itch.